Hidden Text on websites

We get asked for really really cheap websites everyday and can we do a website for €50   . .  ah No.

Cheap website usually come from a kid in their bedroom who has zero understanding about people, technology, marketing, search engines, the internet, design, site navigation and especially Search Engines

Take a look at the images below, there is hidden text on the footer of the website as the “designer” was trying to trick a search engine into returning this site as a genuine result.

Google do not like this: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66353 and infact can ban your website!!

Imagine getting kicked out of the telephone directory and being de-listed. Can you business in this day and age survive being even harder to find?

Hidden Text on websites

This is an image of some of the sites we know about that were “cheap websites” and this will show you what to look at for as more and more web design cowbows are appearing in Wexford and around the southeast in Ireland.

This week we had a call from a business in Gorey that paid €3,500 for their 4 page HTML website that was ok looking but had no chance of ever getting into a search engine and they were told was going to get them to No 1 in google for their industry.

We have taken on that customer now and are revamping the website but they had the opposite problem to this hidden text. They have virtually no content on the site and no extra meta content that a search engine need to help index your site.

If you are buying a cheap website, remember you are putting you reputation on the line, in fact On-Line.

For professional websites that are not cheap, but don’t cost a fortune either call Dave Jordan on 053 9430748 today

Talking to a business owner in Wexford recently and the conversation came around to websites and we talked about getting a good high listing in Google. It then became apparent to me that the person did not associate Website design and website optimization as a similar approach to setting upa a website or redesigning a website. I was a bit confused but after thinking about it over the weekend I did a lot of thinking into why they didn’t associate these two processes, because at Cada Media Ltd, we do.

Website Design

Setting up a website can come in many shapes and sizes, many diffferent styles, but all should be designed with a good webmaster practices and guidlines that will give it a generic listing in a search engines. Website design is about creating a search engine friendly website that is also geared towards the reader. We can not just optimise a website for search results, if we just aim at searches engines and neglect we are actually shootig ourselves in the foot in the long run. Search engines tell us to creates sites for humans and think of them second, but 9 times out of 10 website designers create sites for the robots indexing the sites content.

Website Optimisation

This can be considered a method of website design by some and others would see it as something you do to a site afterwards, for us at Cada Media Ltd we like to think of it as a way of creating a website that will be search engine friendly as you build it. Think of it like building a house, do you build it then afterwards put in the insulation? Yeah, I didn’t think so, me neither.

That being said we do come across websites all the time that have no optimisation built into them, even today we got a call from a wedding car hire business in Wicklow that has recently got a website built totally with images. So when i switched off the iamges on the site, we saw a black screen, this is exactly what a search engine would see too. Nothing!

The choice we have,  is to try to do some website optimisation on it, basically fixing it and this would mean redesigning the website from scratch or trying to imput some extra elements like Meta Tags and actual real text.

Again, going back to the similarity to the building trade, talking to builders I have asked them about renovating a house to make it eco energy efficient and they all say the same thing, they would love to knock it down and build from fresh. We are the same, I told the guy on the phone today, we could optimise the website and charge him, but i couldn’t guarantee the work as the overall structure of the sites using nested tables is not search engines friendly. So after we patch up his site, he still has a site that we would consider is limping its way into the search engines.

To summerise, is it called Website Optimisation or Website Design, well we think if you build it right in the first place it called “Website Design”

To get your website optimised for search engines or get a website designed properly, Call Dave Jordan from Cada Media Ltd today on 053 9430748